Method and its other: Adorno’s challenge to phenomenology

This paper reads Adorno’s engagement with Husserlian phenomenology as a resource for recent discussions on phenomenology and social critique. Transcendental phenomenology’s inability to develop an adequate account of society, according to Adorno, comes from its methodological compulsion to ground this knowledge in first principles. This leads it to produce a socially necessary illusion of society as a harmonious community of monads. If this ‘first philosophy’ produces an inverted image of society, however, learning to see the resulting pseudos is a task for which there is no step-by-step formula. In contrast to Husserl’s construction of society as a harmonious community of monads, Adorno’s critical theory sees society as a negative totality, and he claims that doing justice to this contradictory social object involves breaking the compulsion to system and method as philosophical guidelines. After outlining how Husserl’s conception of method reflects in his account of society, we will review Adorno’s criticism of this aspect of transcendental phenomenology. We will close with a consideration of Adorno’s conception of ‘last philosophy’: a fragmentary project that works to disclose the negative totality through a conceptual reflection on the individual moments composing it.